Un Fin de... Muy Loco

Holy Moses, last weekend made a great story to tell my future grand kids someday…

A group of 5 of us from the school decided to go to this town in the Nicoya Peninsula named Mal Pais. There were beautiful beaches, the sunsets were amazing, and we met some really cool people. First we took a boat taxi from Jacó to Montezuma on Friday morning. It was crazy because this little boat was like catching air on every wave that we hit. Our butts hurt SO BAD but we were laughing the whole time. We made it to Montezuma, which is this gorgeous little hippie town, ate lunch, and took a cab to the other side of the peninsula. It was gorgeous, undeveloped, REAL Costa Rica.

We arrived at our hostel, it was amazing. There were hammocks everywhere. Minus the moldy pillow, our rooms were really nice too. They were two story apartments, the boys upstairs, Bryony and I downstairs. There were no windows though so I got eaten alive by mosquitoes. We found Leffe Brune in the little store right next to our hostel, so we drank good beer and watched the sunset Friday and Saturday night. There were people there from every corner of the globe. Hostels are so cool here because all of the same types of people are staying there. I have met so many people that speak so many different languages so I have just asked them all how to say “I love you” so I can take a little bit of that language with me. So far I have 9: English, Hebrew, Swedish, German, Swiss German, Japanese, French, Portuguese, Spanish. We just relaxed in our hammocks the whole weekend. It was great to get out of Jaco and not have to see any old tourists in there giant beach hats and obnoxious voices. The old tourists here are just crazy. They don’t speak a lick of Spanish, so they treat the people here like they are stupid for not speaking English. They like raise there voice and do some form of crazy sign language to get what they want. Then they just get frustrated and like walk away. Sorry, but you are in Costa Rica?

So we set out at 9 AM Sunday from the hostel. We couldn’t just take the ferry back because it didn’t leave that morning. The plan was to take a cab form Mal Pais to this little town called Cóbano, catch the 12:45 bus, then take that bus to Parquera, catch the 2:30 Ferry across the gulf of Nicoya to Puntarenas, then catch the 4:30 bus to Jaco from Puntarenas. (look at the map of the Nicoya Peninsula posted below)

So we caught our cab to Cóbano ok, it only costed about $3 each. Then we tried to figure out this crazy bus sign in Cóbano, prayed that a bus was coming, it looked like it was written in like sharpie marker. We went to a soda for some quick lunch. While we were there this guy kept asking me and Bryony for a hair tie. I knew he just wanted to know where we kept our purses because he was trying to steal our stuff. The waitress told us to watch out because he was sketchy. He kept telling me that he didn’t want his girlfriend to see him with his hair down... Good one.
We made it on that bus ok and arrived in Parquera. Everyone on the bus was going to the ferry. This place was like the New York Stock exchange on steroids. We had to catch the ferry because it was the only way we would make the bus in the Puntarenas. We ran to the line but it was like 2:15 and the ferry left at 2:30 there was no way we were going to make it where we were at in line. Cars fit on this ferry too, and all of the people with cars had to get their tickets first before they sold tickets to the people who were just riding themselves over. Bryony and I came up with the brilliant idea to sneak into the car line and act like we didn’t speak Spanish and see if they would give us our tickets. We got to the front and they rejected us, and it was like 2:25. We were almost screwed, but Bryony (a 5’0 British girl) decided to just bust through these like 200 pound Costa Rican women and just scream for 5 tickets at the window, she did it after getting elbowed in the face, and we got our tickets! We sprinted onto the ferry just as the horn was blowing and they were closing the gates. We were cheering we were so happy, we didn’t want to get stranded there. So we rode this awesome ferry passing these islands all over the place and jumping fish.
We made it to Puntarenas at like 4:10 and we had to travel to the other side of the island to get the bus, so we thought “ok we will just have to take a taxi.” To our luck there were no taxis in sight and we ended up sprinting down the busy beach street while people are yelling "Vamos! Andale!"to make fun of us. We had heavy backpacks so it was more of a waddle sprint. We ended up making it to the bus stop and it was 4:30 on the dot, and no bus in sight. Another driver told us that the last bus had already left. I honestly wanted to cry, and just then it started pouring raining to add to our hopelessness. This crazy guy named "Louis" introduced himself to us and he was like "hey man I got a friend he take you to Jacó for 50 dollar." We were like umm no thank you I don’t want to be robbed and killed today. We found out from this street vendor that we could take a different bus up into the mountains, and then intercept a bus that was coming from San Jose, basically flag it down.
So we take a 5:00 bus to San Mateo in the mountains, and the bus driver dropped us off on the side of this rainy dark highway. He was like "Walk. that way, you catch a bus." I was thinking “holy crap, we are honestly going to walk like 25 kilometers tonight." So we are walking towards Jacó on this dark rainy highway with semis blowing past us every 5 seconds splashing more water on us. Keep in mind its pouring raining this whole time, like sheets of rain. And we are all in flip flops. We stopped and ate some fries at this little soda and just laughed at our circumstances. We started hiking again and right then a bus to Jacó came zipping by and we waddle-sprinted to flag it down. It was sooo packed we had to all stand up, we were soaking wet too. It was a good laugh because we were all thinking, there is no way this is happening, we are actually going in the right direction? We finally made it home at like 9. I couldn’t believe I was still alive. I at least got to see a lot of Costa Rica in one day. What an experience, like I said it will be a good one for the grand kids someday.

Here are some pictures from the weekend and a map of where we were: